• Bluelight
    Shrine




    A memorial
    to Bluelighters
    who have passed away

RIP ektamine

Three quotes from three paragraphs in succession In Murakami's Norwegian Woods:

"Death is nothing much. It's just death. I am happy here." (The dead speaking).

"Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of life. By living our lives we nurture death. But that is only one of the truths we have to learn."

"No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow."
 
In my dreams you come home. Sometimes you are a toddler and the sweetness of that breaks my heart but there is a comfort. Sometimes, you are a kid, and you are happy and that breaks my heart because even in my dream I know the future but I feel gratitude for remembering your joy. The worst was when you came as you were right before you died and I saw you looking in the window at night, your hands cupped around your face pressed against the yellow square of light from within the kitchen. In the dream, I was not inside the house. I was behind you and to see you that way, to see the yearning and the fear, meant that I, too, could not be in that warm glow of home. If you were outside, so was I. That dream stays with me more than the others. That dream holds all the pain.

I miss you, Caleb. I miss so much about you and our time together. I love you.
 
<3 Herby <3 Your feelings and words are so raw and true. Thy paint a picture of love, yearning and sadness. I wish I could take it all away.
 
FrogWarrior said:
I didn't know your son but I wish he was still here too, reading what you said about the river brought tears to my eyes and I don't cry easily. Reminded me how profound the connection between mother and son can be.
Click to expand...

<3<3<3
 
Recovery

And when at last grief has dried you out, nearly
weightless, like a little bone, one day,
no reason in particular, the world decides to tug:
twinge under the breastbone, the sudden thought
you might stand up, walk to the door and
keep on going… And in the seconds following,
like the silence following the boom under the river ice, it all
seems possible, the egg-smooth clarity of the new-awakened,
rising, to stand, and walk… But already
at the edges of the crack, sorrow
starts to ooze, the brown stain spreading
and you think: there is no end to it.

But in the breaking, something else is given—not
that glittering jumble, shrieking and churning in the blind
centre of the afternoon,
but something else—a scent,
like a door flung open, a sudden downpour
through which you can still see the sun, derelict
in the neighbour’s field, the wren’s bright eye in the thicket.
As though on that day in August, or even July,
when you were first thinking of autumn, you remembered also
the last day of spring, which had passed
without your noticing. Something that easy, let go
without a thought, untroubled by oblivion,
a bird, a smile.

Jan Zwicky
 
Caleb was in a very stupid program there but he loved Western Samoa and the Samoans. We did go there to meet him (as a family). It is an amazing island and a warm culture.
 
Today I read a post on here by someone who is worrying about his brother. Crying now and can't stop. I feel so bad for your brother. Brothers hold memories together, help each other out and have each others backs. You were always my boys, plural. Now you are receding further and further into the past and your brother is pushing on into the future alone without you. I don't want your brother to be alone without family when Dad and I are gone but he will. All over this house two little blonde boys grin at me from picture frames, playing together, building things together, hiking, skateboarding, surfing, pushing each other, eating; sharing all the normal mundane moments of boyhood and adolescence and finally becoming men together. My favorite picture is one of the last of the two of you together, right before you went to rehab. You are sitting with Tyler on a bench in Santa Barbara where we took you to see him before you left. You have your dreads and and both of you are in what I used to call your uniforms--board shorts and tees. There is such an obvious easiness between you. Years of love and the assumption that there will be more years. Today my heart is breaking open again, not for me, not for you; for your brother, who wanted nothing but peace and safety for you, who always believed in your goodness and strength, who no doubt thought someday you would be old guys together, laughing about your antics and trials growing up.
 
It speaks more volumes than could be written that this thread continues to be so interactive to this day.
It really makes me smile and have a warm melancholy inside me :) <3
 
Herbavore,

Your strength has astounded me by just what you have written. Even as a stranger, I can feel that connection you have to your son, and others here.

I read the Shrine for a few weeks before joining. Caleb's life, his story really touched my soul. Almost every story has , but having children your son's age, it affects me in a way I can't explain. And feeling that connection after my own loss in 2002, no one could understand the death and rebirth of a mother's soul after the loss of a child. Yet it's beautiful you still have the support here.
 
It's been a long time. I click on this thread and then I sit and stare. I can't write and I can't read it. Last night you came in a dream. First we embraced, then we fought. You had a bottle of alcohol that you kept swigging like some over-acted character in a bad western...swigging and then spitting out 'fuck you' to anything in your path that dared even move. You had the old anger, the hurt that did not know how to be spoken any other way. I woke up filled with your hurt, carrying it alongside my own.

How many times can a heart break? The only answer that comes to me is, "that all depends on how long you live".

Later today I saw the new kid across the street walking home for the first time from middle school. I know it was his first time because his mom was in the yard and she told me. She was waiting anxiously but she didn't want him to know that. She said, "if you see him first, wave at me and I'll go in so he doesn't know; he'd be so embarrassed if he saw me waiting". I saw him come around the corner--that scared, uncomfortable boy-walk, long hair covering half his face. But when he saw his mom, he wasn't embarrassed. He lit up and gave her a hug. So ordinary. I want to tell you now how I never took one of those hugs for granted, especially at that age when I knew how much it cost you to risk one. Really.

The thing about this thread is this. It's just me talking to me pretending to talk to you. I want you. I want whatever you would have to say back to me. I even want to hear you slam a door or yell like in the dream because that has a future, that goes on, that is alive. No matter what distance I travel away from that horrible day of your death, this is the loop time throws around me. You still aren't here. And I cannot stop wanting you back.
 
I squandered, SQUANDERED my what would prove few sum interactions with Etkamine, acting overly dictatorially, ignoring his sharp and kind mind at the time. However, his reaction (in replying within a particular thread of his) was built out of such careful concern for others that he cultivated very fruitful discussion, discussion that I might have otherwise squelched. Our...universe...remains at a loss with his passing. . .

ebola
 
Thanksgiving 2014: here with the family, where so many years ago I sat with my newly pregnant belly and the just announced mystery of you. We took turns guessing whether you would be boy or girl. Grandpa Tom was sure you would be a girl. Tonight, as always happens at family dinners, memories get brought out for burnishing in the retelling. When a particular memory held you the storyteller would stumble, ambushed by the forever strange and horrific fact that you were not there laughing with us. We are learning--all of us in our own ways--to accept that ambush and go on with the story, remembering you because we do and always will. This fabric that makes a family will always hold your thread. I was so thankful 24 years ago to be pregnant, thankful when you were born, thankful for every single day that you deepened and enriched my life with all you were and all that taught me.

Your brother is in North Carolina cooking his first Thanksgiving meal on his own. I indulged myself in a fantasy of you still being alive and surprising him--the two of you grown and away from me, but together for a good visit with each other. I am remembering that last Thanksgiving when you suggested we go camping in the desert--turkey sandwiches in the bitter cold and that gorgeous hike to the palm oasis in the morning. Memories and fantasies and gratitude not so different from the smorgasbord of food laid on the table today. I am still sat here at the feast of life on earth, in this body and all that means. Once you were a boy that delighted in helping me gather the leaves and berries for the table. Now where? Now what? I hope it is an unimaginable feast of light.
 
Last night I attended the film Dying to Know, about Timothy Leary and Ram Dass made in Timothy Leary's last days as he was dying from cancer. The film was about dying--what it is and isn't and how we live our whole lives grappling with the fear of that moment--and how to do that dance differently. I found myself thinking about the song lyric from Days Like This that says, "all I want to do is live my life honestly" and about how honesty, emotional honesty was so important to you. I thought about the reality that addiction made of you, and of all of us, liars. But you were always honest about how you felt about death and for that I thank you. It gives me comfort to know that death did not completely surprise you, young as you were--that you had conversations with death many times, that you felt secure enough in your own self to do that.

Ram Dass said of grief that it is like someone has thrown down a ball that will keep bouncing through your life. It will go down but come back up again, down and up again. If I live long enough maybe the bounce will run its course as bouncing balls do and someday it will diminish in the highs and lows and simply roll to a stop at my feet. Unimaginable but doesn't your death itself remain unimaginable?
 
Missing you so much. Surrounded by family, everything beautiful and candle-lit, and inside I sit on my little island of grief, remembering and wanting.
 
I'm so sorry herbavore. These must be difficult days for you. I have a daughter of 5 and just can't imagine the pain you are going through.

<3
 
In That Picture

Everything is as it was.
The house still hushed and innocent
the screams not yet housed in our loved bodies.
You, finding your thumb in sleep,
me, watching, singing
the lullaby just above a whisper
not yet ended.
The familiar inhale of breath for the chorus,
"Do not think about tomorrow
Let tomorrow come and go"
and those lyrics still possible,
that, still possible.

Your sweet breath,
the toy rabbit's body and your body
not yet burned in the crematorium.
 
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